Highlight Siphon

On the Amazon Kindle eBook reader, you can save personal clippings, or “highlights,” in a file; later, you can connect the Kindle to a USB port on a Linux machine and grab the data with a Perl script that stores it in a database.

Increasingly, ebooks emulate the properties of their printed counterparts. Purchasers of ebooks on Amazon’s Kindle, for example, can lend their books to friends, add bookmarks to the text, and highlight passages (clippings) in their digital reading material (Figure 1). And, as a nice service, the Kindle sends these clippings to a centralized server so that the user can access them on a different reader any time later.